10 November 2014 11:48 AM

‘Marcus’ writes: ‘Peter Hitchens strikes again! Honestly! How could you possibly link paedophilia with teenage sex education? Are you totally mad? The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active. Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.

'The idea that this man can write something so irresponsible is terrifying. Firstly, he is wrong. As we all know, sexual curiosity occupies many teenage minds and therefore surely it helps for them to know the facts. I was lucky enough to receive education on 3 major subjects aged 13; the first being drugs, the second being smoking and the third was sex. I never smoked, I never took drugs and when I eventually had sex for the first time, aged 16 ( and not with a paedophile, but instead with my girlfriend of 3 years) I was very grateful to firstly understand the importance of safety and responsibility but also because I had some idea of what I was doing.

'As a result, we didn’t end up with a teenage pregnancy on our hands and more importantly it did not put me, or my older girlfriend within the dangerous grasp of "sexual terrorists". Peter Hitchens - you seem to think that ignorance is protection. I think most intelligent people would argue the exact opposite. ‘

Before I answer this, I think it would be helpful to reproduce what I actually wrote, so that readers can easily refer both to the criticism and to the object of it.

Here it is : ‘The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.

Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.

It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.

In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.

If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.

It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.

This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?

If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.

How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?’

Thus, ‘Marcus’ opines that ‘Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.’ It’s that word ‘seems’ again, so often used by people who seek to misrepresent what I say. He chooses to think I say this. But I don’t actually say this. ‘Marcus’ , having chosen to believe that this is what I have said, then pronounces this sentiment ‘terrifying’.

Actually, my only brief and indirect reference to ‘paedophiles’ is to ask ’ how does it (’sex education’) square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?’

I ask the question because it seems interesting to me. In my lifetime, for good or ill (and I think it a mixed bag) attitudes towards sex have been utterly transformed. Pornography, once a matter of deep shame and disgust, has become big business, and people admit to ‘using’ it without shame. Oddly enough, the old claim that by releasing repressions it would improve sexual behaviour is now (understandably) forgotten and nevr made. Yet it was on this basis that the laws against it were dismantled.

The open discussion of sex in almost all circumstances, once wholly taboo, was first permitted and has since become almost compulsory. Sex outside marriage, once universally frowned on, has become normal and respectable. Official documents nio longer refer to 'husbands' or 'wives'. Much the same has happened to child-bearing outside marriage, now widely praised. Sexual diseases on the verge of eradication thanks to antibiotics and VD clinics, have now reached epidemic levels, sepcially in the form of genital herpes. Abortion, a crime in all but the most limited circumstances, has now become a form of contraception.

Pharmacists, once coldly disapproving of attempts by obviously unmarried people to buy contraceptives, must now supply morning-after pills free on demand to all without blinking. Etc etc. GPs and advice clinics merrily defy the wishes of parents by prescribing contraceptive pills to girls who are still living at home, Much of this revolution is described in detail in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. Whatever you think of it, it *was* a revolution, and the world is utterly different as a result of it. Personally, while I'm in favour of some aspects of it, I think it has done a great deal of damage because it has been so total and so rapid. I think people are permitted to have differing views on this, and even to criticise it, without being abused, denigrated as prudes or otherwise howled down.

Apart from rape, which I never discuss because reasoned argument about it is nowadays impossible, only one form of sexual activity is still universally disapproved of. This is the sexual abuse of the young by those older than them. If people want to understand what our pre-revolutionary society was like, then let them imagine that a similar level of disapproval was once directed at many sexual acts and attitudes which are now common and accepted, if not actually praised.

Having seen this transformation, I am forced to wonder if something similar might happen to the current (in my view perfectly correct) horror of paedophilia. People who wished to license such things were part of the original sexual revolution. At least one leading sexual revolutionary has made statements about the ‘positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships’ and argued that ‘not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful’.

Here’s the problem. Once the old Christian boundary has been abolished - under which all sex acts outside lifelong heterosexual marriage were morally wrong - we struggle to find a clear basis on which to decide what we will and will not approve. To say ‘But that’s just disgusting!’ isn’t enough. That’s what people used to say about lots of things we now applaud.

So we move on to the idea that the fundamental problem with ‘paedophilia’ is that the children involved are not giving consent. This isn’t a bad argument at first glance, but it has one or two faults. The age of consent is not universally agreed (differing as it does between countries). And in reality it’s on its way downwards at the moment. Officially, it’s now 16. But the material which caused me to write my article strongly suggests that this is a dead letter, and that 13 is the new minimum. I suspect that in 20 years or so, the ‘real’ age will be lower still. Also, if there is no arbitrary line, such as an age, who exactly decides what is and what is not legitimate consent? Yet we all know that the police and courts don't enforce that arbitrary line.

Now, let me quote again from my prominent sexual liberation campaigner (many of you will know who it is, but I named him prominently some time ago, and feel that was enough. I quote him now to show that such ideas do exist and are held by prominent people in our society). The person involved may have said openly what a lot of other sexual revolutionaries think in private, but have more sense than to say.

This person wrote: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.’

It was after those words that he added:

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Note that he places the earliest age for such things as nine. Nine.

Now, if 13-year-olds are able to consent to sex *with each other*, as the document seems to suggest is all right, I would like to know what (for a non-Christian secular relativist) the objective logical or moral barrier is which says they cannot consent to it with people older than themselves? For me, the very idea is straightforwardly wrong as well as repulsive. I am also a strong believer in what i think of as the Christian idea that childish innocence is a treasure to be preserved as long as possible.

We’ve seen enough horrors in the last century, when wars and their aftermaths have left huge numbers of children exposed to all the cruelties and rapacities of adult life, with horrible results for them. I suspect that Russia, to this day, suffers the legacy of the huge number of parentless children who roamed wild through the USSR after the Civil War. I think it likely that they grew up to be the terrifying criminals who populated the Gulags and were used by the authorities to prey on and kill political prisoners. Children need their period of innocence to learn how to be civilized. The longer that period is, the more civilized the country.

So it seems to me that , in a much more complex way than is allowed for by ‘Marcus’, the sexualisation of children at 13 runs contrary to our loathing of ‘paedophilia’. For me, that’s not a difficulty. I’m against sex at 13, and against paedophilia. I don’t think 13-year-olds can give true consent. I think all sex outside marriage is wrong, and I am governed by Our Lord’s saying (Mark 9.42) that ‘whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea’.

But for the relativists, where’s the frontier? I believe that before horrible, prudish old Christianity came along, quite a lot of societies allowed the sexual exploitation and even prostitution of quite young children. I’m told it’s not unknown in some societies today.

But to return to ‘Marcus’, who says : ‘The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active.’

So he thinks. Well, a few years ago I was asked by the publishers Hodder Headline to contribute to a small volume on the subject (now almost wholly unavailable, alas), and spent some time researching the history of sex education. What I found was that sex education was indeed promoted as a way of protecting the young. But that from the moment it was launched, in the 1950s, it failed repeatedly to do what it claimed. Those things it was supposed to guard against rose exponentially after it was introduced. On the very kindest reading, that makes it an abject failure. I'd be grateful for some research to see if it might have *contributed* to these things , by giving official sanction to what had reviously been taboo. But I'm not aware of any , so can only speculate.

‘Marcus’ may be surprised to learn this, but even in the 1950s, people were able to find out quite easily how babies were made. In fact, this was evidently true even in the pre-TV dark age before then, or we would have died out, wouldn’t we? The idea that schools need to teach people how to have sex, or what results from it, is a self-evident absurdity so huge that nobody questions it.

What emerged from my researches was that the supporters of sex education were the same industry that supported the prescribing of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then to girls without their parents’ knowledge. And it was also the same industry which demanded that abortion should be unrestricted.

Oddly enough, similar agendas have been followed by revolutionary regimes (usually in their early dogmatic months and years before they begin to require cannon-fodder or factory fodder, and therefore need to raise the rate of reproduction, and also in their declining post-war years when they had destroyed family life but were unable to provide western levels of effective contraception. In the USSR, before the end, the number of abortions actually outnumbered live births (6.46 million to 4.85 million in 1990).

This is the price that radical utopians readily pay for the destruction of the stable married family, the principal obstacle and rival to state power in any advanced society, and also the place where people learn religion, and traditions such as patriotism, which Utopian liberals hope to stamp out.

As the late Helen Brook ( heir of Marie Stopes, in many ways) once so succinctly put it (in a letter to ‘The Times’ in February 1980 )‘ From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental state to take major decisions – objective unemotional, the state weighs up what is best for the child’ .

‘From birth till death’, eh? That is what all this is really about – the replacement of individual parents by the utopian parental state. If that doesn’t worry you, then you lack imagination.

Some of you might be interested in an earlier article I wrote on this subject here:

13 October 2013 1:36 AM

Why does Britain need an FBI? We are not a vast continental empire with 50 different legal systems and thousands of local police forces. We are a compact kingdom whose remote, bureaucratic police forces are nothing like local enough.

Nor do most of us spend much of our time fretting about Capone-style gangsterism. It would be tough if we did.

The UK’s biggest and most violent organised crime syndicate, the Provisional IRA, now sits in government and receives taxpayer subsidies through its political front organisation.

What worries us much more is the unchecked misery of so-called petty crime, which infects all our lives with out- of-control littering, vandalism, graffiti, spitting, shoplifting, aggressive begging, unpunished theft and menacing knots of feral youths polluting once-peaceful neighbourhoods.

This goes onwards and downwards, through informally legalised drugs and all the wretched things they bring in their train, and the state-sponsored surrender to drunkenness begun under Margaret Thatcher and completed under the Blair creature.

Nothing happens to those who behave badly. There is no redress for their victims, besieged in their homes or fearful on the street, who have learned not to bother to seek help from the law.

The answer to this is not another bunch of poseurs in baseball caps, running around with guns and shouting. It is the firm enforcement of existing laws at street level by unarmed, foot-patrolling constables.

But you’ll never see them again. Instead, the Government is spending almost half a billion pounds on the National Crime Agency, a rather sinister body (with a big baseball cap budget) whose very existence defies our national traditions.

It is directly under the control of the Government, which appoints its boss. That boss can issue orders to chief constables, who are supposed to be independent of government but now are so no longer.

Its officers are civil servants who must obey their superiors.

This sets them apart from traditional British constables who swear an oath to uphold the law, and so are actively obliged to refuse unlawful orders.

But NCA officials can be granted the same powers as sworn constables, to arrest, to search premises and to carry firearms.

Few now know any of our national history, but Parliament refused for decades to allow the creation of police forces in this country, because they had seen what such forces had become on the European continent.

They were hated engines of state oppression, and a menace to liberty. Robert Peel’s ingenious compromise – an unarmed, non-military force under local control – was devised precisely to avoid that danger.

Now we have the very thing our forebears feared. There was, as far as I know, no public demand for it. We seem to have quite enough top-heavy, self-important unaccountable agencies guarding us from imaginary perils as it is.

It has been created without any fuss or major opposition. And one day, in the hands of a future government, it could be a real menace. When that comes about, don’t say nobody warned you.

Sexed up... the couple who wrecked marriage

It’s interesting what TV chooses to glamorise. One favourite is British traitors who spied for Stalin. For some weeks, we’ve had a sympathetic portrayal of a gang of violent crooks in Birmingham.

But the latest effort is a dramatisation of the careers of the (frankly rather dodgy) sex-obsessives, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Channel 4 hired Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan to play them as an attractive young couple. Actually, Masters looked like something out of The Munsters, and Johnson resembled a bossy nurse in an electro-shock ward.

This follows an equally propagandist Hollywood attempt to make a hero out of that creepy charlatan Alfred Kinsey, another apostle of sexual liberation.

If all this stuff were laid end to end, how much misery would it have been found to cause?

If we were really all so ignorant of sex before the sexologists and the sex-education zealots came along, it’s amazing the human race managed to survive for all that time.

What they really wanted was to wreck old-fashioned marriage. And they did.

Thick and fast comes the vindication for those of us who warned for years that cosmetic school reforms were worthless.

The new OECD studies confirm our case. But can people please stop blaming this exclusively on Labour?

This has been a bipartisan crime. Note well that my generation, the 55 to 64-year-olds, do hugely better in tests than their equivalents of today.

Why? We still had grammar schools. Until they come back, nothing will change.

If killing girls isn’t sexism, what is?

It’s now clear. The law says that if a woman wants to kill her baby because that baby is a girl rather than a boy, that is legal.

Now, I can think of almost nothing more bigoted than killing a baby simply because it is female.Anyone who genuinely thinks that women are as valuable as men (as I do) must be revolted by such an action. That’s even if they think that abortion is fine (as I do not).

From which I conclude, by their weeks of silence on this issue, that the great majority of our feminist sisterhood are lying frauds, motivated not by real feminism but by opportunist, careerist greed.

They will shout for special treatment in employment, education and boardrooms – but they won’t say a word to save an innocent baby, torn to bits in the womb for being the wrong sex.

Coming soon to Downton Abbey – an airship crash in the grounds, a lesbian love affair between a maid and a noblewoman, a male-to-female transsexual butler (played by a woman), and aristocratic heroin abuse.

As I remember, Upstairs Downstairs used to have actual plots.

No need for that sort of thing any more, now that all our soap operas have been taken over by sensation and propaganda.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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06 February 2013 2:48 PM

Here are a few responses to contributors on the subject of same-sex marriage. First, I am told by someone ‘ I'm quite looking forward to gay marriage passing and seeing Mr Hitchens reaction when absolutely nothing happens in consequence. Don't worry though, I'm sure he'll find some way to fuel his persecution complex anyway.’

Has this contributor read a word that I wrote? I think not.

Then there’s Mr ‘L’Eplattenier, who notes ineffably :’ Mr Hitchens does not present us with a single argument against gay marriage. He says compassionate changes in the law would have been sufficient but does not enlighten us on why giving gay people full equality is wrong in his view.’

Again, has he paid any attention? My first 'Stalingrad' article does not offer an argument against homosexual marriage as such, because I believe this argument is a waste of time, a ballet on the head of a pin, while an enormous social change – the slow death of heterosexual marriage - goes on unobserved, unexamined and criticised . That is the whole point of the 3,000 plus words which I wrote , and which he presumably read, or at least allowed his eye to pass over, before commenting.

Mr L’Eplattenier sets himself up as an intelligent contributor, and he can obviously write clear, literate English. Can he read it? He seems to have come here looking for something he did not find, and been disappointed. Thus his pitiable collapse into baseless personal abuse of his opponents at the end: ‘I cannot help but wonder why all these opponents of the new law are presenting us with such feeble (or sometimes non-existent) arguments if it is not because the real reason they are against it is a deeply seated underlying homophobia.’ Wonder away, Mr L, but unless you can prove this charge, your evidence-free ad hominem wonderings will continue to sound like someone who is one or two propositions short of an argument.

In this he is much the same as the persons on Twitter who , on the passage of the Bill last night, speculated on how I would be enraged, in tears etc. If they’d read what I wrote, they’d have known that I was absolutely unmoved.

I am however, interested. And I’ll come on to one or two aspects of interest in a moment.

Fisrt I will deal with contributors who feel that I should hurl myself into this doomed battle.

One Mr Noonan, asked : ‘"How do you square your view that homosexual marriage is a minor issue with the fact (reported by a leading legal expert today) that 40,000 Christian school teachers will be compelled by law to promote gay marriage or face the sack? It is simply a misunderstanding to say that changing the meaning of marriage only affects homosexuals. It affects the whole of society.’

Because the restrictions on what teachers and other public servants can say in public and on public premises already exist, and have existed for many years. This law will, I acknowledge, probably move the ratchet a little further on. But in how many schools (state or private) does Mr Noonan imagine it is possible to state in class that marriage is preferable to non-marriage, without facing serious discipline?

The adoption under the Equality Act of ‘Equality and Diversity’ as the official ideology of the country, with the keen support of the trades unions (the only bodies which might be able to defend individuals against persecution on this matter) has placed the seal upon this. Speech on such matters is already unfree, thiough the censorship is enforced by threats to the offender's livelihood, rather than to his physical liberty. For some odd reason, people seem to think this threat isn't serious.

Note also the case of the foster parents Eunice and Owen Johns who were rejected for fostering by Derby council, because they would not agree to tell any child that homosexuality was positively a good thing. Note, they were not required to silence any doubts they had, which would have been bad enough. They were required actively to endorse the new ideology, and the courts supported this decision, right up to the High Court which said on March 1st 2011 that homosexual rights "should take precedence" over the rights of Christians in fostering cases.

Mr Blades chides me thus : ‘Some people just want to fight same sex 'marriage' because it's right to do so regardless of whether it's possible to win. This issue isn't just about politics or conservatism but about standing for Christian morality and in those kinds of battles sometimes it's just necessary to make a public stand no matter what your enemy does or says or thinks. Personally speaking, if you don't want to get involved then I'd rather you just kept quiet instead of shouting from the sidelines and discouraging those of us who are fighting. ‘

What are these ‘sidelines’? On what way am I on them? I expose my reputation, and quite often my person, to opponents all the time. I would be more deeply engaged in national politics, were it possible for me to be. I have many times explained here why itis not possible( see 'Standing for Parliament' in the index if this discussion is new to you).

But apart from that, what if you don’t just *lose* the battle (which of course the conservatives have done, and will continue to do, on this subject)? For you will lose it. You have lost it. It is over already.

What if you also weaken your own side by allowing yourself to be made to look foolish and prejudiced, for no good reason? What if you waste, time, energy, resources, money prestige and emotion on a doomed cause, which are irrecoverable and cannot be used elsewhere or in future? Aren’t you then guilty of self-indulgence, making yourself feel good about yourself without serving the cause you claim to embrace?

A friend of mine ( I hope he won’t mind me mentioning this ) recently called me to ask for advice on taking part in a university debate on this subject. My main advice (offered jokingly since I knew the friend wouldn’t pay any attention) was ‘don’t go’. What happened? Why, the opponents of same-sex marriage were treated like pariahs, and voted down derisively, losing so heavily that the Christian, conservative moral cause was left dead on the field of battle. What was the point of this? Does ‘going down fighting’ achieve anything for posterity?

Sometimes maybe. But I don't see how it does in this case. We are obliged to fight intelligently,. as well as courageously. Christ himself was known to sidestep tricky arguments from the Pharisees. Read the exchange which ends with ‘ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’.

Oh, and to those who glibly maintain that children are happy when their parents break up, or at least not unhappy, I draw their attention to the terrible, heartbreaking messages sent by Chris Huhne’s son, Peter, to his father, and made public as a result of his court case. I have seldom seen a more frightening and raw example of the damage that adults can do when they break their promises in front of their children.

Mr Colin Johnstone’s summary of my position seems to me to be broadly correct.

I’ll add here one or two points about the Bill which seem to me to be interesting. Some opponents of it now say that the Blair Government, when it implemented Civil Partnerships, claimed that this was not in fact a step towards same-sex marriage. This doesn’t appear to me to be true .

Check the House of Commons Hansard for the 12th October 2004 (this is now gratifyingly easy to do) and read what happens as Jacqui Smith, then Deputy Minister for Women and Equality (note this is now a much more senior position, with a cabinet seat) , introduces the Second Reading of the Civil Partnerships Bill . Mrs Smith is taking interventions from opponents of the Bill:

‘Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con): The Minister has several times used the word "equality". Will she be very specific? Is the equality that she seeks that whereby a homosexual relationship based on commitment is treated in future in exactly the same way as marriage in law?

Jacqui Smith: If the right hon. Lady looks at the Bill, she will see that, in the vast majority of cases, it is the Government's intention that those people who enter into a civil partnership will receive the same rights and take on the same responsibilities as those that we expect of those who enter into civil marriage.

Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con): It would surely be much fairer to Members on both sides of House if the Government came clean and announced that they support gay marriage. Why will they not do so?

Jacqui Smith: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman heard me make the important point that civil partnerships under the Bill mirror in many ways the requirements, rights and responsibilities that run alongside civil marriage. I recognise that hon. Members on both sides of the House understand and feel very strongly about specific religious connotations of marriage. The Government are taking a secular approach to resolve the specific problems of same-sex couples. As others have said, that is the appropriate and modern way for the 21st century.’

Pretty clear, I think(Miss Widdecombe later thanks her for her clarity). And of course those who are now in Civil Partnerships will be able to convert them (presumably for a small fee) into marriages once the Act is law, clear evidence that there is no significant difference between the two.

This is not, in fact, a major change in law, only in terminology and so in the culture wars over language and its permissible use. Even then, as I point out above, it is not that significant, as the Equality Act 2010 pretty much expunged what was left of our former Protestant Christian system (this Act was based on the EU’s four major equal Treatment Directives, which, as sometimes needs to be pointed out, were directives, not suggestions).

The legislation’s principal purpose is to isolate and rout the remnants of the Tory Party’s moral conservative wing, so that, after the Tories lose the next election, which they are bound to do, the defeat will be blamed on their obduracy in face of Mr Cameron’s enlightened heroism. They will then be howled down, Michael Gove or Boris Johnson (bafflingly seen as a figure of hope by so many conservatives) will take up the mantle of David Cameron, and the transformation of the Tory Party into a sky blue pink twin of New Labour can be completed. As usual, the political reporters of the British media, who aren’t interested in politics and so don’t understand it, are quite unable to grasp what is actually going on.

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17 December 2012 5:45 PM

What if the BBC’s Question Time audiences are in fact truly representative of public opinion? It’s a favourite belief of beleaguered conservatives that the studio crowd assembled for this programme is in some way selected to reflect the BBC’s own view of the world.

But I am not sure that it is wise to cling to this belief. For at least 20 years now, the British public have been subject to a stream of propaganda and re-education all the more effective for being subtle. The borders are not closed. It’s not illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Conservative newspapers, magazines and books continue to be published. There are independent schools. People such as me appear on the panels of discussion shows, though under interesting conditions.

Frankly, if the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had had the sense to allow such safety valves, they might still be in power. As long as the young were imbued with the regime’s world view, as long as mainstream TV seldom if ever departed from the agenda of equality, diversity, globalism, climate change, as long as comedy, drama and soap operas were all under the control of pro-regime ideologues, not to mention the book review pages and the bookshops, supporters of the old regime could continue to live in a world of their own, while the government got on with its purposes.

British conservatism – I use the word widely – has really been talking to itself for the past quarter-century. Since the collapse of the Thatcher project, which was never that good in the first place, it has been an exile community, a bit like the Jacobites after 1745.

It has enjoyed itself complaining about Labour government, but never really understood what Labour was doing or why. And it has, in its heart, repeatedly accepted Labour’s legitimacy and right to rule.

The final hours of the last majority Tory government ever, in 1997, were not a moment of grief and fear, but a gentlemanly departure, leaving the garden tidy as they went off to relax at the cricket. I never met a senior Tory in that era who genuinely felt robbed or sorry.

Yet the Blairites came charging into the seats of power, bursting with plans to transform the country irrevocably (Andrew Neather’s amazing outburst about immigration lifted the veil on a tiny corner of this immense project). The neutral civil service, already tottering, was simply destroyed. The Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, armed by Orders in Council with unprecedented and unconstitutional powers, became the head commissar of an irresistible, centralised executive. The independence of the House of Lords was smashed. Northern Ireland was sold to the terrorist gangsters. Even the monarchy was co-opted and made subject to Alastair Campbell, after the death of Princess Diana. Huge, irreversible steps were taken to merge our sovereignty with that of the EU, many of them involving the independence of the armed forces. And so it went on.

And the Tories sat about, making daisy chains, until the day they believed inevitable, when some pendulum or other would swing them back into office. They never fought against the Blairite ideology. Most of them quietly accepted it.

Those were the worst years in which to be an ex-Marxist, seeing a government with at least four 1960s revolutionaries in it in senior positions (none of them open about their pasts or anxious to discuss them, let alone willing to renounce or condemn their past views -by contrast with my good self) , and listening to deluded old Tories saying ‘That Tony Blair, best Tory Prime Minister we ever had, haw haw’.

They seemed to think that because he hadn’t nationalised the ice cream industry, or raised the basic rate of income tax, he wasn’t the head of a radical government. Didn’t they understand that the Left these days cares about culture, sexual politics, open borders, the constitution and the ceding of sovereignty to supranational bodies, plus of course the expansion of a vast client state of welfare recipients and public service workers? No, they didn’t.

During that period, the Blairites sought to get the message across to the Tories – you can’t come back into office until you have surrendered to our policies. This was made plain by Mr Blair himself, at an amazing meeting in Kettering, towards the end of the 2001 ‘election’(in truth there was never any contest, so completely had Tory Britain conceded the right to rule).

He said ‘"At this election we ask the British people to speak out and say the public services are Britain's priority, to say clearly and unequivocally that no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools, Britain's hospitals and Britain's public services. Never again a return to the agenda of the 80s."

I was there when he said it, and I managed to ask him (it was a sparsely-attended occasion and the election was really all over) if he wasn’t presuming a bit, telling the Tories what they should think. He looked a bit vague and Bransonish, and avoided the point. By that stage he and I were both going through the motions.

But while all this was going on, the schools (backed by the BBC) were teaching everyone our new multiculti history, and our new climate-change dominated geography, and our new post- Christian sexual morality. And it worked!

A Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday showed that support for same-ex marriage among the under-35s is 73 per cent. 50 per cent of Tory voters b back it too. It’s only among the pre-revolutionary population, the over-55s, that there is a majority against it, and it is not a very big majority.

I suspect most middle-aged people don’t really have strong feelings about the issue one way or the other. Christian sexual morality more or less collapsed when divorce-on-demand became legal in the late 1960s.

They’ve just realised that the majority is now in favour, and it’s simpler and more convenient to join in.

I’m not advancing an argument here, just stating a fact. I don’t use the phrase ’silent majority’ (I may have done long ago, but I can’t recall when) because I have long suspected that there isn’t one. The fact is that propaganda works, and people like being in the majority.

The question of what is right or wrong, on the other hand, cannot be answered by opinion polls, and never will be.

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29 November 2012 12:04 PM

I am grateful to those who responded with interest , or otherwise welcomed my review of ‘Orderly and Humane’, a book which I do very much hope will be widely read and discussed. I am even grateful to those who wrote to point out the typographical errors in the posting . I would just ask them, rather than to make this a genuine expression of disapproval, to tell me what the errors are so that I can put them right. I have no sub-editors here to rescue me from my own bad typing. I learned from the age of eight to type badly and fast with four fingers, which is how most journalists type, and computers, for reasons I have never fully understood, make me even more error-prone than I was in the days of ribbons and paper. actually it is, alas, impossible to correct your own work properly, even after five readings I will still fail to spot glaring errors, as the writer sees what he hopes and expects to see, a microcosm of the problem of knowledge, belief and understanding which we would do well to heed. We need other people to help us get things right.

I am also grateful to one stern critic, ‘Frankz’ , who writes :’I generally respect your opinion but what can be said here? I must admit you wore me down about half way through. In a war that cost 56 million lives by some estimates the list of atrocities is endless. How easy to make a catalogue of them and thereby conjure a historical road block. Another war to end all wars even as the seeds of the next one are sown by those who fervently spread this illusion and think they can give it substance by the force of their character and the humanity of their concern. There is so much here that is lacking. Those that fought did not die in vain unlike the millions rounded up like cattle and exterminated like vermin in the camps. To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka. I feel that almost all of your points could be easily refuted or shown to be narrow in focus but to what end? It would change nothing. I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

I am always a little discouraged when people appear to sigh, as if their opinion was obviously right (‘what can be said here?’) . It betokens an unwillingness to alter a long-held view. First, the atrocities I listed followed the war and did not take place during the war. Secondly, they were planned and approved at the highest level.

I made no comment about whether people died ‘in vain’ , not myself being qualified to judge the circumstances in which a death is ‘in vain’, but suspecting they are known elsewhere, by authorities more knowledgeable, and more highly-placed, than us.

But I am not sure what he means by ‘To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’. Perhaps he could elaborate?

If he means what he thinks I mean, it is indeed an interesting indictment of the allied war effort, widely believed by those educated since the 1970s to have been principally a rescue operation to save persecuted Jews, that the allies made no effort of any kind to help Europe’s Jews or hinder the industrial murder of them . Professor Douglas provides a partial explanation of this. The Polish wartime leader Wladyslaw Sikorski told Anthony Eden (p.24) that it would be ‘quite impossible… for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room must be found for them elsewhere’ (any serious historian knows that pre-war Poland, our future gallant ally, was a hive of rather vicious Judophobia, though it’s not done in fashionable circles to stress it these days). I might add his mention of remarks by the then British ambassador to Warsaw, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, ‘The slaughter of Jews in this country has made the towns a good deal cleaner, and has certainly decreased the number of middle-men’ (p.182, taken from British Foreign Office files, exact reference in the book). Professor Douglas says that anti-semitism in Poland remained ‘ at ‘pathologically high levels’ even after the slaughter of most of the country’s Jews.

But it seems unlikely to me that a failure to act to save the Jews in any way excuses the slaughter of German civilians. The logic of that simply escapes me.

He then adds :’ . I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

Well, if her aim was to preserve her identity, then she made a pretty poor job of it. Any normal person transported from the Britain of 1939 to the culture and civilisation occupying the same space today would find it so transformed as to be baffling and frightening. Much of that transformation , the Americanisation, the destruction of historical landmarks, the changes in manners and diet, the debasement of language, morals, manners and of educational standards, the assault on privacy, the overcrowding, noise , state interference, crime and disorder, are directly traceable to our incompetent participation in the war, which we entered at the worst possible moment and then promptly lost, only to be subsumed in the strategic schemes of the USA and the USSR, neither of which had any interest in preserving us as a major independent power(the sine qua non of keeping one’s identity).

So if that was our aim it was a very poorly pursued aim, which we failed to achieve, and the timing of our entry, wholly dictated by the ludicrous and empty guarantee to Poland, was the principal reason for our failure.

Now , a few words about ‘Bert’, our most pretentiously-named contributor, who once again speaks out from his solipsistic mountain top. And what a delight it is to see what he says (in this case to Paul Noonan) :’ I don’t know why you’re babbling on about ‘huge campaigns’ in the fire brigades (I’ve never heard of them).’

Now, poor old Bert misses quite a lot of developments. He’d also never heard, for instance of the EU Landfill Directive. And when it was explained to him that it had a profound effect on rubbish collection in this country (is indeed the principal reason for the spread of fortnightly collections) he was unable to acknowledge this and has yet, to my knowledge, to admit that he was mistaken and inadequately informed on this subject.

Bert is never wrong, for if it looks as if he might be , he changes the subject . Recently he accused me of denying freedom to non-believers by recommending the teaching of Christianity, as truth, to children. When I pointed out that I advocated the continuance of the existing freedom for parents to opt out of such teaching, he said that didn’t count because parents were apathetic. Then he changed the subject, to say that it would be all right to teach them *about* Christianity (i.e. as an anthropological peculiarity of others, rather than as a faith they might be reasonably expected to embrace and follow in their own lives), but it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived.

Well, that’s just slippery. How can a national religion survive if the schools don’t endorse it? It’s not as if any mechanism exists to force those taught it in this way to accept that it *is* true. They can disbelieve it when they’re taught it, or renounce it later, as many do. Indeed, they then know what it is they disbelieve, and can criticise it more effectively.

But if they’re never taught it as truth, at an age when they are interested in such questions ( and the young are more interested in the great questions than anyone else, except perhaps the dying) the they will be denied the chance to decide to believe it at all. And this will gradually cease to be a Christian country.

So what ‘Bert’ is actually saying is that we should follow a policy which will provide the ‘freedom’ to believe in nothing, or to have no belief, but not offer the freedom to believe. Meanwhile the state schools teach( as truth) the ideas of sexual permissiveness and egalitarianism, in PSHE classes and ‘Bert’ has not, to my knowledge offered any objection to this, or described it as an abridgement of freedom that it is so. If he does so now, he will at least have achieved a sort of consistency. But his real purpose, the deliberate secularisation of a formerly Christian country, cannot be cloaked as a struggle for ‘freedom’.

As to the campaign top recruit women into the Fire Service, I refer him to an article (reproduced below) which I wrote for the Mail on Sunday of 7th April 2002, which describes the official measures. I suspect ‘Bert’ of not himself being in the Fire Brigade, which would explain his unawareness of this campaign:

Were the Government to announce that within seven years 15 per cent of nannies would have to be male, everyone would think they had gone mad. Yet an equally absurd plan - to feminise the fire brigades of Britain - is quietly under way, and many in the fire service fear it will one day lead to needless deaths. They believe it has already done severe damage to discipline and morale. However, a creepy censorship prevents them from speaking their minds. With employers and union united in the anti-sexist cause, honest doubt is being stifled by a totalitarian refusal to admit there might be a problem.

Fighting fires is as masculine as nannying is feminine. This is not just because it has always been done by men, but because physical strength is at the very heart of it. Firefighters do many things but the job we really pay them for is the one that nobody else can do: bringing human beings out of burning buildings or cars before they die. Some women have proved they can do the job: a small group who have earned the respect of their fellows by working hard and well. They have also survived the bullying, insults and 'practical jokes' which tight-knit groups often inflict on newcomers.

However, their hard-won position will actually be undermined by the Government's 15 per cent quota, because all firewomen are now bound to be suspected of having slipped through the selection process because of their sex.

Even when the tyranny of political correctness grips almost every field of life, most sensible societies recognise there are limits. But the ultra-feminist movement besieges the strongest outposts of a male society, precisely because such outposts remind everyone that sex discrimination is often sensible in real life.

Get rid of them and you are halfway to destroying the old male role of husband, father and provider, which is the real target of these extremists.

The current campaign became possible in 1997, when 5ft 3in Gillian Maxwell was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough. She took them to a tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population. In these strange times, this suspect argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act which had set a minimum height of 5ft 6in for all UK fire brigades. Since then, many more women, and incidentally large numbers of small men, have tried to join up.

Fire services found it hard to defend their sensible policy of hiring big, strong men, not because the policy was wrong but because of the boorish stupidity of some firemen, who deliberately persecuted female colleagues. This obscured the intelligent arguments against having large numbers of small female firefighters. It is not much use saying you have nothing against women if you deliberately foul the ladies' loo, order female colleagues to make your tea and noisily watch pornographic videos when women are around.

There have been other changes, too. Discipline is now derided as 'militaristic'. The proud name of 'brigade' is being phased out and replaced by 'service'. More graduates are joining, and veterans wonder - with reason - what use a degree is in a fire. They say the new mood has led to a decline in the old team spirit, which they believe is vital in the heat, danger and potential panic of a serious fire.

There is also a nasty, totalitarian atmosphere in which people are afraid of speaking. All the firemen - and firewomen - who wrote or spoke to me begged me to keep their identity secret. Complaining publicly about the new policy is death to a career and can even lead to disciplinary action.

As ever, the TV soap operas have joined the 'progressive' cause. Though most fire stations remain all-male, London's Burning features feisty fire officer Sally Fields played by Heather Peace. Reality, however, is different. Ms Peace has admitted she could not be a firefighter in real life. 'Of course not. I'd be a gibbering wreck,' she says.

Just as the police have been suffocated by political correctness since the Stephen Lawrence case, fire brigades also face a relentless campaign to change their conservative, traditional culture.

In March 1999 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, declared that the fire service's equality record was unacceptable and that the Government wanted a service that 'looked like Britain in all its diversity'. He then set the target of 15 per cent women in the brigade by 2009, a giant increase on the current 1.4 per cent. Six months later a Home Office report rammed home the message: the service was ' institutionally sexist'.

Yet there is no evidence that the fire service's male domination has cost a single life. The report admitted: 'Exceptionally high levels of satisfaction and support are reported from the public at large.' The truth is that the fire service works well and is popular and respected. Its male culture helps keep morale and efficiency high. But under this Government, politically-driven sexual equality is more important than firefighting itself.

Is this wise? Medical experts agree that absolute strength - the maximum amount of weight that can be lifted - is far higher for men than for women. The average woman has between 50 and 60 per cent of the upper-body strength of an average man. Training and exercise can partly overcome this, but why go to all that trouble? The fire service is such a popular job that it has dozens of strong, fit applicants for every vacancy.

Yet more and more women are being chosen. How is this?

There is no standard national test for firemen, but everywhere the entry requirements have changed in the past 15 years. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests have been dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - has been scrapped. Now there are fitness checks that might have been designed to gloss over the differences between men and women.

Everyone from the Government downwards insists there is no sex bias. Widespread claims that women are slipped through on the nod or given special advantages are flatly denied. But in the London Fire Brigade, this boast of freedom from bias turns out not to be entirely true. Women can repeat fitness tests if they fail, without having to go back to the beginning.

This is said to be part of a 'positive action programme'. If the Government really wants to hire an extra 6,500 firewomen in the next seven years, there is going to have to be a lot of such 'positive action'.

And positive for whom? I have spoken to many experienced firemen who are convinced that more women in the fire service will mean needless deaths in the future, either of members of the public or of firemen whose colleagues cannot rescue them. To be fair, I have also spoken to union officials and firewomen who say we have nothing to fear.

There is, sadly, only one way to find out, which is to follow the current policy and see what happens.

But why should a successful and effective service be revolutionised, and why should the public be guinea pigs in a social experiment driven by militant feminism? Is this extremist campaign worth a single human life? ‘

A footnote. A contributor asked to which system of thought Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill subscribed. Well, Attlee is on record as saying that he did not believe in a deity, though tought the Christian ethic very fine. Winston Churchill's private religious beliefs are, so far as I know, a matter of controversy among those who have studied his life and work. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge on this.

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08 November 2012 12:26 PM

Mr Armstrong responds to my complaint about people shouting ‘I’m on the train’ into mobile phones, in designated quiet carriages, with the bizarre retort :

'So, Hitchens doesn't like the way us 'common folks' talk eh'? He don't like folks saying '‘I’m on the train!'. What a plonker! Where else would the person be if not *on* the train - on the platform?’.

I have no idea where he gets the idea that I am attacking ‘common folks’. Usually, in my experience, the culprit is a florid , fruity-voiced businessperson, who becomes empurpled with resentment and rage when it is gently pointed out to him that he is in a quiet carriage.

I am told by someone who wishes to be known as ‘E’ that ‘Skyfall’ is ‘just a film. Well, yes, I know that. But what does he mean ‘just’. Does this ‘E’ imagine that fiction has no effect on those who read and watch it? I should say the fictions of Dickens had more impact ( and continue to have more impact) on the thinking of people than great masses of factual material produced in the same era. As Philip Pullman rightly points out, if you wish to influence people, ‘Once Upon a Time…’ is a far more persuasive beginning than 'Thou Shalt Not..’. I am always struck by how much supposedly classic fiction is about loss of religious faith or adultery, described sympathetically. These are the scriptures of the century of the self, and they have a huge effect on the way people think about such things.

Good authors make the reader want to emulate, or desire the approval, of the characters in them. Films, by reaching direct into the watcher’s brain, have an even more powerful effect. A concept, presented sympathetically in a film, will take root where a speech or an article would not. Many people will come out of ‘Skyfall’ more sympathetic to the idea of a large and well-funded secret service than they were before. I am amazed at the flat, mechanical thinking of anyone who seriously imagines that such things don’t influence minds, and that because something is ‘just’ fiction it has no cultural or moral significance.

That’s like saying that tower block estates are ‘just’ architecture. Indeed they are, but they have changed the way that millions of people live, and much for the worse. The arts are important.

The same person (so confident of his or her case that he or she cannot reveal his or her real name) lectures me thus : ‘“Underage girls” are not being given contraceptives so they can be abused and taken advantage of by older men like Jimmy Savile, they are being “offered” contraception so they don’t become pregnant as a result of consensual sex, (in most cases), with their peers.’

‘Before you start ranting on that “underage girls” and boys are not able, by definition, of giving consent the age of consent is itself an arbitrary figure and varies from country to country and from time to time. In Spain, (a catholic country) it is 13, Germany 14, Japan 13, in the Cameroon it is 21. No one is forcing these young people to have sex unless it is peer pressure that is doing so’

***To which I respond that I could just as easily dismiss this person as ‘ranting on’, but I prefer to argue in a civil way, dealing properly with the facts and logic.

Underage girls are being given contraceptive injections and implants, without the knowledge of their parents, because that is how our state and laws respond to the collapse of sexual morality. Rather than trying to re-establish moral rules about chastity which protected the young from themselves , and from exploitation, we take the brothel-keepers’ view that the principal risk of sexual intercourse is a) pregnancy and b) venereal disease.

Actually, I think it is quite widely understood by thoughtful person that the intimacy of sexual relations is an important part of human integrity, that the young, and especially girls, are often badly wounded in the heart by casual sexual flings, and that the more civilised a society it is, the higher it sets the age limit for consent. Whatever the limit may be in the Cameroon, the laws of this country set it at 16. Maybe there is a case for lowering it. I myself doubt it. But it has not been successfully made or enacted, and the law remains as it is.

Yet these contraceptive implants and injections are provided in schools, to girls who cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse, by the lawfully constituted authorities. How can it then be that they – whose funds are raised through taxes, which it is illegal to evade or refuse to pay, whose very existence depends on the law, who can and do obtain prosecutions of parents for keeping their children away from school – can simultaneously aid and abet the breach of the law on consent?

Who, by the way, is to say how these children will act once they have been assured that they are sterile and can have sex without ‘risk’ of pregnancy? Can the writer be sure that their only encounters (damaging and dispiriting as these will almost certainly be) will be with other teenagers? Is it not possible that this sterilisation will make them readier victims for older men and other exploiters? And what if they come from homes which still believe in the sanctity of marriage and try to teach their children Christian sexual morality? The power of the state, using money raised by compulsory taxes, is being used to make it easier not just for these girls to break the law of the land, but also to defy and overthrow the authority and desires of their own families. Surely any liberty-loving person would object to such monstrous interference in private life by the state? But not the totalitarian ‘E’.

‘E’ continues, ‘and how much more cruel would it be to force a teenage girl to have a baby at a time in her life when she is not emotionally or financially ready for that responsibility?’

**What is this ‘forcing’? There is another,(separate) debate about rape and abortion (in which as it happens I take a difficult and unpopular line because I am so appalled by the deliberate murder of innocent and defenceless babies). But even if the law reached a different view, and permitted the abortion of the children resulting from rape( as it does, and has since 1938) these girls are not for the most part being raped, or expecting to be raped. They are choosing whether to have sexual intercourse. In my view they should be educated to choose not to do so outside marriage, for their own good, for the good of all of us, and for the good of any children they may eventually have. The fact that some will always break such moral rules does not mean the state should intervene, with secrecy , money and chemicals, to assume that all will do so and equip them for the morally unsatisfactory and unhappy lives which will result from it.

‘E’ again ‘Offering girls at the age of 16 contraception is a pragmatic response to what is happening now.’

**What does ‘pragmatic, a notoriously shifty word, mean in this context? Actually the policy of amoral sex instruction, combined with the ready provision of contraceptive devices and pills to the young, has until very recently been followed by a steady increase in unwanted pregnancy. Finally, probably because of the widespread introduction of the freely-distributed ‘morning after pill’ (developed by vets for use in pedigree bitches who strayed into bad company, and morally as questionable as abortion itself) , the totals are at last beginning to drop. But the bloody price for this drop is huge, and those of us who believe in sexual restraint would argue that on any calculus, the previous arrangements led to far , far less death, while also restraining promiscuity, which people like me regard as bad in itself, and damaging to those who take part in it. In simple practical terms, as well as in absolute moral terms, the new policy is inferior to the old.

‘E’ continues:’ If you want to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and so the need for contraception then the answer is education, education and more education, giving these young people, especially girls, the confidence to say no and control what happens to their bodies rather than a return to the sort of Edwardian values and standards you seem to favour.’

**This is simply an assertion of what ‘E’ believes, followed by an assertion that ‘E’ is right. ‘E’, apparently having no absolute moral code, cannot appeal to any authority other than his or her own will and desire for such an assertion. . There is of course a choice. For me, it is decided by my Christian belief, but as so often happens, the Christian response to any such question often also turns out to have major utilitarian advantages, in my view in the same way that you will be better able to maintain and repair something if you refer to the maker’s manual than if you do not.

I don’t, despite silly misrepresentations, desire an ‘Edwardian’ society. The past is gone. I want a 21st century Christian society, which can distinguish between genuine progress and its various counterfeits, using a timeless moral calculus. I merely date our current moral decline from 1914. The question about ‘education’ is invariably ‘what are you teaching?’ If you teach debauchery, you will get debauchery. Myself, I prefer not to return to Babylon, or even to ancient Rome. Both these pre-Christian societies were very cruel indeed, and cruellest of all to women. Our current society, likewise, is increasingly cruel to women, hence the grotesque epidemic of plastic surgery, Botox and the rest, as women without the protection of lifelong marriage strive to remain saleable, for sex or toil, in our great liberated meat market.

‘E’ continues :’ I don’t know the exact numbers or ages of young women being offered contraception, without parental consent, (do you get in such a lather at the thought that underage boys may be sold condoms without the knowledge or consent of their parents ?), but to do so is not a subversion of parental authority if the individual concerned is able to give informed consent ,which many 16 and 15 year olds can.’

**N Once again this is no more than assertion. ‘E’ is right because ‘E’ says ‘E’ is right,. This way lies madness, made worse by such claims as the one that 16 and 15 year olds can give ‘informed consent’. I suspect that ‘E’ is childless, and not very old or experienced in life. I5 and 16 year olds know almost nothing about such things, and are intensely vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. That is why we have laws to protect them. The fact is that these things are deliberately kept secret from parents. This is an abuse of state power, and totalitarian in effect.

What is this ‘lather’ in which I am?

‘E’ concludes ‘What was considered morally wrong in your day was every bit a shifting boundary then as what is considered “inappropriate behaviour” now.’

Not so. Christian marriage is an absolute standard, and remains so. Also, decrepit as I am, this is still ‘my day’ . I live in it, so must my own children. I have at least as much right to have a say in it as ‘E’, and in my view more so, since I have seen so much and lived so long that my opinion is likely to be worth more.

‘E’ again :’ The terminology may have changed but the fact has not. Edward I married his first bride when he was 14 and she just 13, how do you like those for changing values? ‘

I regard our boundaries in such matters as a significant advance upon the Middle Ages, obtained through the growing strength of Christian thought and morals especially in the Reformation and what followed it. ‘E’ appears to wish to go back to those Middle Ages, if not way beyond them. Progressives, eh?

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10 March 2012 10:01 PM

This week I would like you to help me solve a mystery. Why did Lord Dannatt, one of the bravest and most illustrious soldiers of his generation, disappear from a campaign in favour of traditional marriage?

Or perhaps I should ask instead, why was he disappeared from it?

I can tell you these facts. Lord Dannatt chaired a large pre-launch meeting of the Coalition for Marriage on January 16, at the grand Langham hotel in Central London. A woman who was present tells me that he seemed bullish and enthusiastic when he mingled with the others – like him, mainly Christians of various denominations – before the gathering got going.

Many of those present had the impression that this distinguished and outspoken former Chief of the General Staff would be the figurehead for their movement.Then two things happened. The launch of the Coalition was delayed from February 3 to February 20. And when it finally burst into the open, Lord Dannatt was nowhere to be seen.

Its leading figure was instead Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a powerful force in our national life but far less powerful than Lord Dannatt would have been in that role. It is hardly surprising to see an archbishop defending marriage. It is a good deal more arresting if a retired General, an unashamed Christian much admired for his courage and conscience, stands in the front rank.

But the General wasn’t there. I have asked him to explain what happened and he politely but firmly declines to do so, saying it is a private matter. Well, he is entitled to that. But I am likewise entitled to carry on asking, and to mention one or two things.

Mr Slippery, the Prime Minister – who appointed Lord Dannatt to the peerage – is now a keen apostle of homosexual marriage. I suspect Mr Slippery couldn’t care less about the issue. But in his oily way he wants to provoke moral conservatives into opposing him. Then he can smear them as ‘homophobic’ bigots and crush them for good.

This would be a good deal harder to do if General Dannatt, nobody’s idea of a goofy swivel-eyed prejudice-monger, were on the other side.

Anyone who wants to guess at Lord Dannatt’s (private?) views on the matter may study his brief intervention in the House of Lords, in a debate on whether churches can legally be forced to host civil partnership ceremonies, on December 15, 2011. He tried quite hard to get into this debate. I think it fair to say that Lord Dannatt is not a member of the Notting Hill Set.

These are the facts as we know them. Is it possible that Lord Dannatt came under some sort of pressure between January 16 and his disappearance? Who can say? But I will be grateful to anybody who can throw light on this puzzle.

It is, after all, an important political development, far more significant and interesting than most of the power-worshipping gossip and drivel that passes for political journalism in this country. I do wish people would realise that the future of Britain is no longer decided at Elections or at Westminster.

Instead, an intolerant radical elite is moving rapidly to ensure that any strong centres of resistance against the politically correct ‘Equality and Diversity’ agenda are first isolated, then intimidated, then crushed.

And we airily attack Vladimir Putin for squashing dissent. If he’d been to Eton, like our Mr Slippery, he’d obliterate opposition with such smooth charm that we wouldn’t even notice he was doing it.

Only a REAL war on drugs would have saved AmyThe father of Amy Winehouse, God rest her soul, is campaigning for compulsory drugs education in schools. He says his daughter might still be alive if she had received such education.

My heart goes out to Mr Winehouse in his loss. But he is terribly wrong. His daughter did not die of ignorance. She died because our corrupt society, whose elite is crammed with past and present illegal drug users, not to mention legal heavy drinkers, is prepared to sacrifice a significant minority of young people to death or madness, to protect its own pleasure.

Severe and properly enforced laws against drug possession, combined with a restoration of the tough alcohol licensing laws we had until 25 years ago, would save and protect the young. Drug ‘education’, like sex ‘education’, would take the form of amoral propaganda, based on the false assumption that ‘everybody’s doing it anyway’, designed to undermine and bypass the authority of parents.

Mr Slippery's empty words of regretOur three identical political parties this week praised the six soldiers they had sent to needless, pointless deaths in Afghanistan. Then they expressed regret at deaths they could have prevented and didn’t.

Scorn is not a strong enough word for what I feel about these people. How dare they regret what they could have prevented, had they possessed one hundredth part of the dead men’s courage?

Mr Slippery keeps our soldiers in Afghanistan, where many more of them are bound to meet equally purposeless deaths, because he is too cowardly to admit the mission is pointless and pull them out. He ensures that they are sent out (often so scared that they throw up their breakfasts, but, even so, they still go) on terrifying foot patrols on which they may at any moment be blown to pieces or maimed horribly for life – for no reason at all. Let me repeat that, for no reason at all, for no reason at all.

Yet Mr Slippery himself does not dare to make the journey from Downing Street to the House of Commons on foot, but is instead cocooned in an armoured limousine.I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Slippery’s car was better protected against bombs than the obsolete Warrior in which the six met their deaths.

Oh, and let me just remind you that when the bodies of the six dead men are returned to RAF Brize Norton, probably next week, they will be driven out by the back gate, avoiding the town of Carterton which sits at the front gate.

I do hope the people of Carterton will not allow this cynical trickery to keep them away from the roadside when the time comes to honour six men who did their duty and kept their word, and who are giants compared to those who sent them into danger for nothing.

Act now on scandal of 'antidepressants'Here’s an important breakthrough in the battle to get a proper investigation into ‘antidepressants’. Dr Declan Gilsenan, former Assistant State Pathologist in Ireland, says he has seen ‘too many suicides’ after people had started taking antidepressants, and has questioned whether GPs are overprescribing them.

After 30 years as a pathologist he says the evidence is ‘more than anecdotal’. Sooner or later, this scandal will explode. Why not sooner?

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13 June 2011 4:08 PM

Is there any point in public debate, in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

Sometimes I wonder.

I asked a simple question in my main column item – about why Christians, in their charitable work and in their engagement with wider politics, should make no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

I produced two unambiguous quotations from scripture which clearly permit, and indeed demand, such a distinction. It would be odd if they did not. The idea that someone could live comfortably at the expense of his fellow men , when he was able to work, would have been so unthinkable to any previous civilisation that it would have been regarded as absurd.

The real question is whether the modern creation of a large welfare-dependent class in our society is an improvement on the past, or a worsening if the human condition. I tend to think it is the latter, and to blame many of the faults of our cruel, coarse, disorderly society on the extension of welfare to people who do not really need it , and the reclassification of human weaknesses and failures as incurable ‘disabilities’ which must be indulged. In some ways worse, these failings (drug-taking, drunkenness etc) are equated with genuine disabilities which are not in any way the fault of the sufferer.

But my critics don’t take this up. Some go into diversions about the rich. Well, if the rich start claiming welfare payments, or evading the taxes they are legally obliged to pay, then I’ll start condemning them for it. But if not, they’re not part of the argument. The rich ( I know this annoys communist levellers, but it’s true) spend their own money. Welfare recipients spend other people’s money, taken from those other people by taxation under the threat of imprisonment.

Then I was accused of indulging in theology, by atheistical logic-choppers and show-offs who have swallowed R.Dawkins and A.C.Grayling, and long to lure me into some futile dispute on a subject which doesn’t interest me and in which I’m not versed – not because they actually wish to debate the subject, or would ever concede their position as a result of argument, but because they wish to show off. No dice, guys.

I think this is in any case mistaken. Theology is to do with the philosophical arguments for religion as such. I wasn’t making any. I never do. My only point is that we are free to choose whether to believe or not, as I have many times explained here. Quite a lot of my opponents actually seek to deny this choice by various means, which generally have little to do with facts or logic.

The most I could be accused of here is internal scriptural exegetics, aimed only at people who already accept the Christian faith, and at one who, in the Archbishop’s case, is its chief representative in this country. The quotations I produced from Holy Writ are wholly unambiguous and can only be interpreted in one way. They are also from the New Testament, uncomplicated by the supersession of many Old Testament laws by the new covenant.

None of the other hostile comments addressed this simple point – that there are different sorts of poor people, and it is reasonable for Christians to distinguish between them.

My own view is that those who needlessly throw themselves on the charity of others are active thieves from the poor (who are in the end the main source of both tax and charity) and frauds on goodness, who poison the wells of generosity and altruism, and their actions cry out for justice. This does not in any way affect my belief in charity as a duty.

Likewise, nothing I said from the Question Time platform in Norwich is specially controversial. Most serious persons agree that much foreign aid is wasted, misdirected and misappropriated. Some does positive harm. The late (Lord) Peter Bauer, who knew more about this than all of us put together, did say what I quoted him as saying. The proportion of our aid budget which is controlled by the EU is as I said ( I confirmed the figures with Mr Mitchell’s department that morning, and he told me he had personally signed off on the answer).

Yet I was treated as if I had said all aid should be stopped, which I didn’t say, and don’t believe.

Likewise it is true that our society was until the 1960s a sexually restrained and puritan one, and that it changed largely because an active and persuasive minority wanted it to change, though many others have since decided that they, too, approve. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest (my main point) that the sexualisation of children is a consequence of that . It is undeniable that sexually charged and explicit material pours out of the radio , the TV and the Internet.

As for sex education, much of it is aimed at overcoming the inhibitions of pupils about what many of them reasonably regard as private or embarrassing matters (the use of joke words for body parts in class, etc). It is perfectly reasonable to describe this as taking away the innocence of those exposed to it. As I have said before, if any adult apart from a teacher said these things and illustrated these acts in front of our children, mobs of News of the World readers would be breaking their windows and demanding they be sent to jail forever. As it is, they’re paid to do it by the taxpayer.

Sex education was originally devised by George Lukacs, as education commissar during the brief Hungarian Revolution, to debauch the minds of religiously-brought-up children. When it was first introduced in this country it was purely biological, and heavily circumscribed. It is only as the power of parents has declined, and that of social workers and teachers increased, that (under the excuse of combating disease and under-age pregnancy) it has been permitted to become so explicit and to be based on the assumption (itself both false and morally questionable)that the young will have sex outside marriage whatever anyone says or does.

As for my statement that the pretext for sex education is that it will prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies etc, this is demonstrably so – that is what its advocates say it is for. Equally true is my further statement that, the more sex education we have had, the more STIs and unwanted pregnancies we have had. In the absence of research into this correlation, we may only guess as to the cause of it, if any. But what is certainly true is that sex education is failing *on its own terms*.

Nothing I said was specially controversial. On Libya, many of my critics in the audience would have agreed with me if it hadn’t been me saying it. As it is they didn’t want their views expressed by such a wicked person (‘the Sunday Mail hack’).﻿

The howling intolerance of a vocal section of the audience (and the licence given to members of that audience to barrack me and interrupt me) shows how any defiance of current orthodoxy is now greeted not with argument but with rage. It is probably a good thing that there was no question about man-made global warming, or who knows what might have happened?

All this has drawn attention away from other oddities about the programme. Why does the Coalition now qualify for two members of a five-person panel? Isn’t a newly-elected MP who hasn’t risen above the rank of Parliamentary Private Secretary a bit junior for such a task? And why was the Labour Party represented by a man who, while a heavyweight politician, is no longer even in Parliament? Wasn’t anyone in the Shadow Cabinet available or able?

I should not here how grateful I am for the kind letters and e-mails I have received from viewers who felt that I had been unfairly treated, or needlessly abused. I can’t really complain for myself – if I couldn’t take a joke, I shouldn’t have joined, and I’ve experienced far worse than that in TV studios and elsewhere. It is a reasonable price to be paid for getting on to the most powerful medium of modern times, which conservatives have to use if they can, whatever they may think of it. The real sufferers from the unfairness and the abuse are not me, but the BBC licence-payers who are entitled to more respect for their opinions.

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28 May 2011 10:22 PM

Human rights are a threat to free speech. This has never been clearer, since the breathtaking attempt by the judges to gag the reporting of Parliament. What sort of mind comes up with this tyrannical idea, and sees it as an acceptable price to pay for covering up the misdeeds of nauseatingly rich celebrities?

It is suddenly, terrifyingly plain that the Human Rights judges instinctively loathe proper British liberty. The new dogma of Human Rights gives them a mighty weapon against it, which they now feel strong enough to use.

It has always been hard to fight against Human Rights because the phrase sounds so nice. Who could oppose such a wonderful thing? But now we know why we should oppose it in one important detail. If the alleged ‘right’ to privacy is so powerful that it trumps the freedom to report parliamentary proceedings, then we are better off without such a right.

Every single one of these rights can be interpreted in some similar twisted way. And for too long we have failed to notice the nasty revolutionary origins and the nasty purpose of this noble-sounding idea.

Human Rights, closely related to the ideas behind the bloodthirsty, ruthless revolutions in France and Russia, are now being used to give our own Left-wing elite the power to override a thousand years of tradition, national independence and freedom, in the name of something that sounds noble but is in fact sordid and ugly.

In the past 30 years I can think of only one instance – a group of railwaymen who refused to be forced into a union closed shop – where Human Rights have been used in the interests of real freedom. In many other cases, the Human Rights Act has been deployed to reduce the freedoms of the hard-working, the tax-paying and the law-abiding.

The rights asserted have been those of lawbreakers trying to avoid justice, illegal immigrants trying to avoid deportation for criminal acts, prisoners trying to win votes and similar unpopular and unwanted changes for the worse in our way of life.

If Christianity is being sidelined, marriage reduced to the level of any other sexual relationship, Britain being pressed to adapt to immigrants rather than the other way round, extreme feminism imposed on workplaces, schools compelled to re-admit trouble-making pupils, Human Rights will be involved.

Real rights and freedoms are not like this. Our British Great Charters, Claims and Bills of Rights do one simple thing – tell the Government what it cannot do. These are in truth the only rights worth having.

But it has become deeply unfashionable to say so. In fact, the elite has become so committed to this unpleasant dogma that opposition to it is viewed as wicked.

People like me – though still allowed to speak – are allowed on to mainstream national broadcasting only under strict conditions: that we are ‘balanced’ by at least three other people who disagree with us so that our views, actually held by millions, are made to look like an eccentric minority opinion.

In some cases, newspapers, once open to our views, are pressured into silencing our voices. Our books, if we can get them published, are not reviewed. The major political parties won’t select us as candidates. And so on.

No, of course, it is not as bad as being arrested and locked up – though in modern Britain it is increasingly possible to have your collar felt for expressing an unfashionable opinion.

But it is without doubt an attack on our freedom of speech – which is of little value if millions never hear what we say – while our opponents are not restricted in the same way.

Now that we see Human Rights openly employed in a direct attempt to gag MPs and reporters, perhaps others will begin to wonder if the great liberal revolution is as good and kind as it claims to be.

Flipping burgers doesn’t make up for moronic wars

I thought it quite gruesome to see David Cameron and Barack Obama dispensing grilled meats to service personnel – some of them wounded in war – in the Downing Street garden.

It is bad enough that David Cameron has caught the Blair disease, and thinks the Armed Forces are his rather than the Queen’s.

But what really dismays me is that both these men have been responsible for prolonging the purposeless war in Afghanistan, in which many British and American soldiers have died – or have been too terribly injured ever to attend a barbecue again.

In both countries this is because these leaders didn’t have the courage to admit the war is pointless, and end it. Feeding soldiers burgers doesn’t make up for sending them off to be killed or maimed without good reason.

If Mr Cameron and Mr Obama really cared about them, they’d put away the barbecue, and bring them home – and also halt the increasingly moronic intervention in Libya before it gets any worse.

Cannabis: the dreadful truth

When a giggling Jared Loughner was first charged with the horrible mass shooting in Phoenix, Arizona, I suggested that he was insane and wondered if he had been unhinged by his acknowledged past heavy use of cannabis.

I still do. It is now plain that I was right to suspect that he is seriously mentally ill. We still need to know why. I would like to see some research done on this. The cannabis lobby (what’s in it for them, by the way?) were furious with me for even suggesting such a thing.

In Britain and America there are countless parents of teenagers who have good reason to suspect that this supposedly harmless, allegedly soft drug did dreadful damage to their sons and daughters. More and more research suggests a link between cannabis and mental illness.

I believe that within ten or 20 years, that link will be as clearly established as that between cigarettes and lung cancer. And that those who now noisily insist that this drug is harmless will be as discredited and disdained as the Big Tobacco lobbyists who pretended for so long that there was nothing to worry about.

In the meantime, wouldn’t it be wiser not to take the risk, and for the law against this drug to be strengthened rather than weakened?

****************We now have proof that computer games stop children reading, withering their imaginations and filling their minds with grubby rubbish. Parents have a right and a duty to protect their young from this sort of thing. You wouldn’t give your children neat gin. Why leave them alone at the screen?

***************It's time for another round of grandiose Middle East ‘peace’ efforts. The one thing that can be guaranteed about these is that they will lead to more war and more death.

Anybody who really cared about the suffering people of the region would stick to helping everyone get richer and live better, a process quietly under way already.

There are already shopping malls in Gaza (yes, really, I’ve been there), Hebron and Ramallah. Israelis and Arabs cheerfully share the same cut-price supermarkets on the road south of Jerusalem. Prosperity and normality, not endless wrangling over land, is the road to peace.

***************The more sex education we have, the more abortions we have. So can we try having less sex education for a few years and see what happens?

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23 February 2011 3:33 PM

Please note that’s ‘ a conservative’, not a ‘Conservative’. As I so often have to insist during these discussions about the mighty appointed BBC Presenterocracy, it’s not *Party* affiliations I’m interested in, but which side of the great moral, cultural and social divide the person is on.

Mr Paxman is on record as saying that he has voted for ‘all the major parties. “More than the main three, oh certainly.” This was in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead of ‘the Guardian’. As readers here will know, I don’t regard the Conservative Party as being particularly conservative, so that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the subject in question.

Then there’s the past. Mr Paxman says he was a communist at school, and famously described himself as a socialist when he applied, in his twenties, for the editorship of the Left-wing ‘New Statesman’ magazine.

All right, you say, so people change their minds. As indeed they do, and should.

But (in answering the question I pose above) I can offer two significant pieces of information. So far as I can discover, Mr Paxman is not married to the mother of his children, despite the relationship being apparently long and happy. In my generation, such a situation generally means that those involved (one thinks also of Alastair Campbell and his unwife, Fiona Millar) do not approve of marriage. This position is neither particularly uncommon nor controversial among the metropolitan Guardian-reading left. But it is not a conservative view.

Second, let us return to the ‘Guardian’ interview with Ms Aitkenhead for a moment (this was published on 9th February 2009).

She asked him if his children were educated privately. Here’s what happened: ‘When I ask if he educates his children privately, he gets very defensive. “I’m very ready to be hung for anything that I do, but I think their lives are their own.” But they don’t decide where they go to school. “Yes, but it is they who go to school.” I’m not asking you to name their school, I say, I’m just asking if you educate your children privately. “Mind your own business.” ‘

Now, I have educated my children privately since the moment I could afford to do so. I’d rather not (I’d have much more disposable income if I didn’t). But I regard it as a defensible, wise choice. I’d rather the state schools were capable of doing what private schools do, and that they didn’t do some of the things that private schools tend not to do - that is, undermining the messages children get at home, with multi-culti, anti-Christian, PC propaganda.

I don’t think the generality of private schools are by any means immune from many of the weaknesses of modern education, but they are not as bad as the generality of state schools. I know there are some exceptional state schools, but - despite being rather well paid - I can’t afford to live in their catchment areas, which, thanks to the requirement for large sums of capital, is (oh, what a lovely paradox) often far more expensive than paying fees for a few years.

I think there are strong, powerful reasons for my doing this.

On the other hand, Leftists (see the chapter on ‘Class War’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’) see something morally questionable in using private schools, and when they do it, often do it reluctantly. Among affluent metropolitan leftist types, it’s a constant source of anxiety (see the long and fascinating quotation from Nick Cohen about this in my ‘Cameron Delusion’) . It cannot always be solved by such dodges as getting your children into Roman Catholic schools that are in all important respects grammar schools. Or by moving to the hugely expensive and tiny catchment areas of Camden Girls or William Ellis, among the few excellent private secondary schools in London. Sometimes, and this really hurts, the whole chequebook has to come out or the children get hurt.

For these people, private education is morally troubling. That’s why David Cameron, who wants to appeal to precisely this class of person in the media, has wangled his child into a simply lovely C of E primary rather than pay the fees he could easily afford (though things will get much more difficult once secondary schools are involved). That’s why Ms Aitken, who is a very sharp interviewer, asked the question. She knew it was profoundly revelatory. And that is why Mr Paxman, an equally sharp interviewer, didn’t answer it.

In general, I’d also ask my ‘Paxman is a conservative’ theorists to see if they can answer this question. Mr Paxman never had any trouble before 1997 interviewing Tory ministers from an oppositional (and therefore leftist) point of view. His job, you might say. He has to play Devil’s advocate, etc. But can anyone remember him interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate? Not as a disappointed leftist Devil’s advocate, please note (the standard anti-Blair critical position of the post-1968 media classes). But from a socially, morally, culturally ( and constitutionally) conservative point of view?

Relevantly, I can recall during my long-ago stint as an (openly partial) presenter on the then ‘Talk Radio’, interviewing William Hague, and wishing afterwards that I had been able to find it in myself to be harder on him. But the muscle and force just hadn’t been there.